Creepy: Amazon’s Alexa Virtual Assistant Randomly Laughs at Users

The Daily Mail first reported a number of users complaining of odd sounds and actions being performed by their Amazon Alexa devices. The main complaint was of “creepy laughter” being emitted from the device’s speaker at random intervals, while other users noted that their devices became unresponsive to commands. Some users took to Twitter to post about their unnerving experience with Amazon’s devices, a few of these tweets can be seen below:

Lying in bed about to fall asleep when Alexa on my Amazon Echo Dot lets out a very loud and creepy laugh… there’s a good chance I get murdered tonight.

When Breitbart News reached out to Amazon for an explanation of the error, an Amazon spokesperson stated: “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.” Amazon reached out with a further explanation upon inquiry stating “In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase “Alexa, laugh.” We are changing that phrase to be “Alexa, can you laugh?” which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance “Alexa, laugh.” We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to “Sure, I can laugh” followed by laughter.”

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com